Jinger Duggar Admits She Was 'Afraid' to Have Kids Because of Her Upbringing: I Thought It Was 'My Destiny'

Jinger Duggar may have grown up with 18 siblings, but she doesn’t want to follow that path.

In this week’s episode of The Unplanned Podcast with Matt and Abby Howard, Duggar, 30, and her husband Jeremy Vuolo opened up about how her upbringing shaped their relationship. Noting that she did always want children, she said she grew up with a negative connotation around motherhood.

“I was never the one that was like, ‘Give me your kid, I'm going to go babysit your kids for you,'" Duggar said. “I wanted to have kids, I was just really afraid of the thought of having as many as possible.”

The 19 Kids and Counting alum said once she met Vuolo, 36, and realized that minister Bill Gothard, — whose teachings were the basis of the family’s religion — was “twisting” the Bible to make “a case for something he wants you to do” rather than what the Bible actually calls for, her views changed.

“[I thought] that was what my destiny [would be],” she explained. “That was going to be it. I was going to get married and have a lot of kids.”

She added: “Once I realized that I don’t need to have as many kids as possible, I felt a massive weight off of my shoulders."

Vuolo said one thing he noticed was that the Duggar kids were “always taught what to think but they were never taught how to think.” He noticed that in many areas of her life, noting how Duggar was unsure about her personal likes and needs.

As a child, Duggar said she knew a lot of women who got married and immediately began having children “until they couldn’t have children anymore.” To her, this looked like a “burden.”

“I saw so many moms in that setting who were so beat down,” she recalled. “They were having child after child, they were on bedrest. They were so sick, the younger siblings were having to take care of the other kids for the nine months that the mom was sick.”

“I was so afraid to think about that,” she confessed.

Vuolo also noted that when he began courting Duggar, her father allegedly told him to listen to Gothard, which is when he realized he was not reciting the same things as the Bible.

“It was a twisting of scripture to tell every woman, ‘This is what you do regardless,’” he explained.

Eventually, once Duggar gained some clarity, she said the idea of planning a pregnancy appealed much more to her. That was the moment when she started to feel excited about her future as a mother.

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She and Vuolo, who have been married for seven years and share two children together already, said they wanted to feel that parenthood was a choice.

“I think it can be a sweeter situation, where [babies] are coming in when you're like, ‘Oh, I’d love to have a kid now, let's have a kid,’” Duggar said. “Kids are great and they are a blessing.”